Windows Store (WinRT/Metro)–Network Helper Methods

In getting used to WinRT and the changes in the Framework, we need to find new ways to do things that we used to be able to do one way or another. I will update this as I find better ways of doing things or add more code, but here is my first pass at a few methods to facilitate downloading content from the Internet as a string, stream or byte array (for downloading pages, web service content, images, files, etc). The code was written in VB.Net. None of the converters that I use have been updated to handle some of the Async code from 4.5.